One of the lesser used conditionals in Autotask, but likely the most powerful in fine-tuning how your workflow rules (WFR) work, is the To/From conditional.
Let’s setup a reason why understanding how the To/From is often a better choice than Equals/Not Equals.
A common situation is that you need a WFR to update a Ticket Status. Let’s say that when you have a new ticket, you want the status to be, obviously, set to New. This lets you easily triage a ticket by filtering for New, and is a great status for use in a dashboard widget.
Now, let’s say the client adds a note to the ticket, via Client Portal or an email, and the ticket status flips to New Client Note. If this happens before you triage the ticket, you could be in a pickle. The ticket is an orphan, not properly coded, and is outside a well-defined workflow for most helpdesks.
A new admin in Autotask may try to build a rule like so:
If Ticket.Source EQUALS Client Portal AND Ticket.Status NOT EQUALS (New, Complete) then..
Then.. what? This is not a workable WFR. Your techs will want to adjust the ticket status as they do work, so this rule will fail. The better solution is to define a business workflow like so:
New -> Waiting Dispatch -> In Progress/Waiting Client/New Client Note -> In QC -> Complete
To handle this easily in a WFR, we instead craft a WFR like so:
If Ticket.Status CHANGED FROM New AND Ticket.Status NOT EQUAL TO Waiting Dispatch THEN SET Status = New
This flips a ticket back into New unless it goes through the Triage status and enforces a business rule you have.
Tired of manually dispatching tickets, scheduling work, and escalating tickets? Automate it with Flight Deck for Autotask.
